Course Description

We read much nineteenth-century literature as if someone had gone through our dictionaries deleting every fifth or sixth word. Commonplace expressions of key ideas fly right over our heads. In particular, the Bible and the ways Victorians understood it in terms of apocalyptic and other prophecies had such enormous effects upon the way they wrote about their world that today one finds difficult grasping their attitudes towards politics, gender, character, and the arts.

Therefore this course explores the ways Victorians read the Bible provided cultural codes that formed and informed a wide range of Victorian texts, including autobiography, fiction, poetry, art criticism, and sage-writing. The course, which examines the implications of such interpretation for gender and genre of contemporary conceptions of typology, prophecy, and apocalypse, reads works by Charlotte Brontë, the Brownings, Carlyle, Hopkins, Newman, the Rossettis, Ruskin, and Swinburne as well as a few Victorian and earlier writings about biblical interpretation.

Class meetings take the form of student-centered discussion generated by brief weekly writing assignments During a typical class 3 or 4 students will lead discussion based their question sets, which computer projection enables the the other members of the class to see. Occasional brief mini-lectures by the instructor — no more than 5 or 10 minutes long — will provide information required by the discussion or raise related issues. A few such interspersed mini-lectures might concern student writing and ways to improve it.

Reading List

Note: Check this on-line reading list at the beginning of each week since assignments may change or be reordered.

Week 1. Introduction — Reading a few poems with and without knowing how Victorians read the Bible

Weekly discussion questions. The course relies heavily on student-centered discussion generated by the weekly writing assignments. These reading and discussion question have several required parts:

Choose a substantial passage of 1-3 paragraphs or stanzas when discussing a literary text; choose a single work when discussing a painting, drawing, or example of decorative art;

Create a graceful and effective introduction to the material you chose that suggests why the reader should want to follow you as you examine it closely;

Follow the quoted passage with at least one paragraph of commentary.

Ask 4-5 questions, chiefly concerning matters of technique and comparison to other works, for which you do not have to have answers. As the semester progresses at least one question should involve a comparison of the painting or poem or other text you discuss with one read in a previous week.

Provide a title for your question set and include your expected graduating class.

These exercises, which provide the basis of class discussion, should generally be e-mailed to me no later than 6 pm Sunday before we begin discussing the reading, though you can also occasionally send them in Monday or Tuesday. (You can skip a single set of questions during the semester, and we may not have one the final week of classes.) Follow for an the first question set to arrive in another course some time back.

Books

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Broadview paperback edition)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. Norton Critical.

Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book. Broadview paperback

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems. Oxford.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam. Norton.

Related Resources

A substantial portion of the readings, including primary and secondary texts on Victorian religion, biblical interpretation, and relevant literature, are available on-line, mainly in the Victorian Web.